Assessing SEO for a New Website

Your business’s website is the final destination for all of your digital marketing efforts because it’s where users become qualified leads or make a purchase. Creating a website that attracts and converts potential customers is an essential investment into your business, so you don’t create dead ends for users or miss technical red flags. Here are some things to pay attention to as you prepare to launch your new website.

Pre-Launch

Build a technical foundation that sets your website up for reporting and indexing success. Not everything can be resolved before you launch your new website, but you can identify the tasks you’ll need to address after the launch. Specifically, keep in mind issues you might need to address if you are building your website on a staged site, to reduce migration errors.

• Run a crawl on the staged website looking for “no index tags” that signals where “no index tags” are on the staged site. Make sure to remove all of the no index tags right before you launch the new website.
• Add robots.txt to alert search engine crawlers about which pages or files the crawler can request from your site. The robots.txt file is one of the first elements that search engines visit, and serves as a set of instructions to understand the value of your website organization and content for users. Robots.txt files should include pages that are neither crawled nor indexed in live SERPs. This includes pages that contain sensitive content or do not provide a positive or relevant user experience for organic visitors. The robots.txt file should also provide a link to the XML Sitemap. 
• Create an XML sitemap for search engines to crawl and index that provides search engines with information about the organization of a website. An XML sitemap should contain a list of all pages that should be crawled and indexed.
• Write and implement new meta data for all new or updated pages. Meta descriptions are snippets of HTML code used to further describe the contents of a page. The page titles and meta descriptions are what potential visitors view in search engine results. They can be used to further inform potential customers and search engines about the page theme and intent. Each landing page should have a unique meta-description that is concise and descriptive of that page’s content.
• Implement Map 301 redirects for pages that have been removed or moved to a new URL. All references to the page should redirect to an active URL. Too many redirects can reduce your site speed, so limit the number of redirects when possible.
• Check your SSL and HTTP2 certificates to make sure that Google and your website visitors know that your website is safe and relevant. SSL is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This ensures that data passed between the web server and browsers remain private. Google incentivizes enabling SSL security on websites. HTTPS sites receive a minor ranking boost compared to HTTP sites and sites with the HTTP prefix flag as unsecure in some web browsers.
• Set up the canonical URL if you have a page accessible by multiple URLs. Canonical tags provide search engines with information that highlights the relationship between similar pages of content and helps websites avoid potential duplicate content penalties. The canonical version of a URL is crawled more often, so don’t let Google decide which one it is for you. Canonical tags can also help the overall ranking for these pages by consolidating domain and link authority ratings into one preferred, or canonical page.
• Implement schema markup to help search engines better interpret and understand your website’s content and structure. Schema markup is implemented as a snippet of HTML code added to the source code of a website. It identifies your important website and business details like business hours, price points, and more. Schema markup may be displayed in live search engine results pages (SERPs) and can lead to higher organic click-through rates.
• Create a custom 404 page for users viewing a broken page to help them find the page they are looking for. It also helps retain visitors by encouraging them to stay on-site with links back to the homepage and directing them to featured content elsewhere on the site. A custom error page should also provide a prominently located internal search function, and prompts to “contact us” to further engage visitors.
• Test the responsive design of your website across devices. Responsive design enhances user experience by reformatting automatically based on a user’s device type and screen size, reducing the need for the user to scroll, enlarge, or shrink the page to interact with the content. A mobile-friendly website design is one of the fundamental components of a mobile-optimized website. Ensuring that a website is mobile-friendly presents a positive user experience, and can help a website increase visibility and indexation on the mobile search index.

Post-Launch

The time after you launch your website is all about quality assurance and closing the loop on any issues you identified pre-launch. Errors are an expected part of the quality assurance process, and you proactively want to be the one to catch them. 

• Check robots.txt for errors.
• Check indexing for errors.
• Test site speed to ensure visitors aren’t waiting for your content to load.
• Test form submissions for errors.
• Update links that may be broken, as well as any internal links that lead to other pages on your website. 
• Update external links located on other websites where needed and within your control.
• File a change of address with Google if you’re changing the domain URL. This is very important to transition your business’s online presence without disruption.

What’s Next?

If you’re interested in a coordinated website and SEO strategy that showcases your business and converts more leads, Adpearance is here to help. Our website and SEO teams work together to make sure that your business’s website is optimized from the ground up — for users and search engines. Reach out for free website analysis to learn more.

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